History and physics entangled Disciplinary intersections in the long nineteenth century

This dissertation uncovers historical relations between two knowledge disciplines that are usually defined in contrasting terms: history and physics. My main claim is that the histories of these disciplines have crucially depended on one another: they are “entangled.” To support this claim, I describe the sharing of three knowledge-making tools by historians and physicists in nineteenth-century German-speaking contexts: the concept of “fact,” the epistemic virtue of “exactitude,” and the method of source criticism. I argue that, by sharing these tools of knowledge making – which I subsume under the notion of “cognitive goods” — German historians and physicists defined the boundaries of their disciplines, while also maintaining a common, empirically oriented culture of knowledge making. I also pay attention to the divergences that emerged as part of these disciplinary intersections. In particular, I show that historians and physicists assigned different roles and interpretations to the concepts, virtues, and methods that they shared. This illustrates a fundamental aspect of how disciplinary communities interact: when they share tools of knowledge making, these tools inevitably transform. Finally, this dissertation aims to contribute to a better understanding of the historical relation between the natural sciences and the humanities. Previous historiography has dealt with these areas of knowledge mostly in separate terms. However, as this entangled history illustrates, disciplines that we today consider as belonging to the humanities or the natural sciences, turn out to have an intimately connected history. Hence, their histories should be studied not separately, but in relation to one another.